From October 29, 2025, to March 1, 2026, the GAM – Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Torino presents the first Italian institutional retrospective dedicated to Linda Fregni Nagler (Stockholm, 1976), curated by Cecilia Canziani, as part of TERZA RISONANZA.
The Swedish-born, Milan-based artist uses photography as a means of inquiry and reconfiguration of the visible, intertwining historical research, collecting, and a deep reflection on the materiality of the image. Her practice examines iconographic conventions, visual clichés, and the use of anonymous images, constructing narrative devices that open up new reflections on our relationship with time, memory, and perception.
The exhibition, titled Anger Pleasure Fear, brings together more than twenty years of work, unfolding through different cycles. At its core lies the dialogue between The Hidden Mother (first presented at the 2013 Venice Biennale) and the new series Vater (Father), dedicated to the ritual duel Mensur, once practiced by student fraternities in Central Europe, where scars became emblems of courage and distinction. Through this encounter between presence and concealment, body and symbol, Fregni Nagler’s photography becomes a space of poetic tension and ethical reflection.
Around this central dialogue, the exhibition develops through several key series that articulate the artist’s ongoing research. Pour commander à l’air (MAXXI Prize 2014) reinterprets press images stripped of text and context, turning them into open fragments of meaning, while the ongoing series Untitled and Smokes, clouds, explosions engage with modernity through photographic enlargements and lantern slides from the artist’s collection — the same archive that forms the basis for the performance Things that Death Cannot Destroy.
The exhibition also features seminal works such as Non voglio uccidere nessuno, an early series foreshadowing her later themes, the new project Little History of Subjugation, exploring the ambiguous relationship between human and animal, and a collaborative work with physicist Michael Doser: a glass plate hand-coated with silver gelatin and exposed to a beam of antiprotons, testifying through the body of photography to the existence of antimatter.
Through the acts of collecting, observing, and reinterpreting, Linda Fregni Nagler transforms photography into a living form of thought — a reflection on the image as both object and subject of memory. Her works inhabit a liminal space between document and vision, science and poetry, evoking the fragile balance between history and imagination.
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog published by Quodlibet, featuring essays by Cecilia Canziani, Geoff Dyer, Luisella Farinotti, Federico Nicolao, and Dieter Roelstraete, underscoring the international scope of an artist who, for over two decades, has been exploring photography as an archive of contemporary sensibility.
GAM – Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Torino
Via Magenta, 31, Torino
Date 29 ottobre - 1 marzo 2026
